Writing a personal statements for creative subjects

What is the personal statement?

Your personal statement is your opportunity to tell the universities that you are applying to:

• why you are interested in their course
• why they should consider choosing you
• what you are like as a creative person
• what inspires and influences you
• why you will make a great student
• what your ambitions are

This is especially important for courses that do not offer an interview

You have a maximum length of 4,000 characters.

How do universities use the personal statement?

Universities will use them in different ways, but generally speaking…

For interviewing courses

Admissions tutors will read your statement to get a sense of what you are like in deciding to invite you to an interview.

They may highlight parts of it to ask you about in the interview.

For non-interviewing courses that require a portfolio

Admissions tutors will look at your personal statement at the same time as your portfolio.

Your portfolio will speak the most about your creative ability.

Your statement is there to back up everything else.

For non-interviewing courses that do not require a portfolio

Admissions tutors will look at your personal statement to get a sense of what you are like as a creative person, and why you are interested in the course you have applied for.

You might be asked by courses to write an additional statement to support your portfolio, or write answers to questions as part of your interview. That is separate to the UCAS personal statement and focuses purely on your work.

Personal statements for creative subjects

Creative courses look for a very particular kind of statement – it should focus on what you are like as a creative person as well as why you are interested in the subject.

Extra-curricular activities that aren’t linked to your course are less important in a statement for a creative course (for example, being a prefect, Duke of Edinburgh) – but you can still include them. Just make sure to give priority to the creative stuff.

Some key things to think about

Why are you applying to study a creative course?

• Why this specific specialism?
• What do you hope to try or learn?
• If you are applying to different creative subjects e.g. architecture and the general foundation course, then you could talk about things more generally – focus more on why you’re applying to something creative.

How do you make work, and what is it about?

• What materials do you like to use, and how?
• Why have you made this work, or developed it in this way?
• It’s important to think about your ideas as much as the materials that you use.
• Do you make work outside of school?

What or who inspires you?

• Artists, designers, architects, photographers, musicians, books, rusty things, light, patterns, fashion, insects, bodies, concrete, pavements, biology, origami, found objects, nature, feminism, religion,

Exhibitions, galleries, shows or work that you have seen.

• What did you think? Like? Dislike?
• Have you been to university degree shows?

Have you taken part in workshops or activities? Tell us about them!

• What did you do
• What did you learn? Like? Dislike?
• Was it a challenge? How did you deal with this?
• ACES is recognised in university applications – so make specific mention of our workshops if you have been to one.

Do you know what you want to do in the future? If so let us know (but it’s ok if you don’t!)

I’m applying to lots of different creative subjects

Don’t stress! We’ll make it work.

If you’re applying to a few different creative specialisms it can be hard to see how to fit them all into the character limit. But sometimes these are the most interesting statements!

The ACES advice is to focus on the common principles that you’ll find in all of the courses.

For example – you are applying to the following courses:

• Architecture
• Interior Design
• A more general art & design course

On the surface these may seem really separate. Architecture focuses on structures and the design of buildings. Interior Design is more focused on spaces and how we use them – repurposing more than creating new ones. A general course covers everything from communication design through to painting.

 But the common thing for all of them might be the following:

Structures, spaces and how we design them

This works just as well for fine art, fashion and textiles (etc) as it does for architecture and interiors

Storytelling

How do we tell stories via creative and structural practice

Spaces and places have histories – but so do animation, illustration and graphics

People

How they engage with spaces both functionally and creatively

Again, this works for architecture and interiors in an obvious way – but could apply to the kind of installation and gallery work you see in fine art.

These are just some quick examples!

Whatever it is that you’re interested in – it will translate in some way to all the creative courses that you apply to.

Step 1: Getting started

ACES top tip is to break it down into quick thoughts before building it back up again. Avoid staring at a blank sheet of paper and going straight into full sentences – chances are you’ll get writer's block or head straight into waffle territory.

You will need:

• A big piece of paper (or lots of A4 ones). Create yourself a mind map like the one below (there is a copy at the back of this book)
• Use wee post-it notes and pop your thoughts relating to each one of these really quickly. One post-it per thought – don’t add detail just yet. We’ve included some examples below.
• Don’t think too much or worry if it’s right or wrong, just get it on the paper. Start with the one that comes most naturally to you

Step 2: Building it up

Once you have lots of thoughts down, you can start to organise and develop them. For each thought add another, larger post-it note with more depth.

Try to do this for all of your initial thoughts – then we can start to put them in order.

Step 3: Create a structure and making links

There’s no right or wrong order, and the joy of working on post-it notes is you can move them around until you have something that suits you and flows really well.

You can start with any one of them – but make it interesting! You don’t have to start with why you want to do the course – that can come in later if it feels right.

You can also have sections in your statement for different topics.

Step 4: Writing it up – adding detail

Once you have an order in place you can start to expand and write properly.

• Be sure to write in full sentences.
• You need talk about each thing in some depth. For example:
  • Why do you like this artist?
  • How have you made this work?
  • What caught your eye in that exhibition you went to see?
  • What did you learn from that ACES workshop you went to?

A wee example:

You could say…

…but this doesn’t show what you like about the artist, your understanding of their work, how it links to your project, why photography is important to you etc.

Here it is again in more depth:

Chances are this text is too long, as it is 634 characters!

You only have 4,000 characters for everything – so we need to edit this down!

Step 5: Writing it up – editing it down

Using our detailed paragraph as an example

Here I have scored through words to remove, and added shorter ways or saying things or letters to help things make sense:

634 characters!

And this is what it looks like once written properly:

As you can see, this has now been reduced down to 463 characters!

As you can see – the important information is still there, but we have cut out 171 characters. We can take it even further:

You can see that this has now been reduced down to 365 characters!

Tips and things to avoid

ACES can help you edit your statement or simply have a look and offer some comments – so please email [email protected].

Pick a point that comes easily to you and take it from there – you don’t have to begin with why you want to study this course if it more natural for you to begin with your influences or how you make work.

Start small and build it up. Get quick ideas down on paper for each point and then begin to add in detail for each one.

Be flexible – try moving things around and see if they read better.

Ignore the character limit (4,000 characters including spaces) at the start – you can edit it down later. Most first draft statements are at least 6,000 characters

Write meaningful statements and explain your points in depth.

Be careful how you word things. Avoid things like:

• ‘Art is my therapy’ – the practice of art and design is a profession. Art might make you feel good, and you might want to be an art therapist in the future, but for your uni application you need to talk about it seriously.
• “sketchy drawing style” – try words like ‘loose’ or ‘relaxed’.
• “doodling” – you’re applying for a formal creative course. We don’t doodle.
• Slang words – this is a formal piece of writing.

Avoid cliché openings such as:

• "Ever since I was young I have wanted to study art” or
• “Ever since I sold my first painting aged 8 I knew art was the path for me”
• “I have wanted to study art since I was young enough to hold a pencil”- If this is the best reason you can come up with for wanting to study a creative degree, then it sounds like you haven’t thought about it since you were a child, and you aren’t that serious
• “I highly appreciate this artist” – would you speak like this in real life

Be descriptive, but don’t overdo it. Watch those adjectives!